Angel Tarot Cards - tarot decks

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ProductID: alt582

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About this item

The Angel Tarot Cards is the first tarot from the very popular creator of oracle decks, Doreen Virtue. It's a full set of 78 cards with images of angels, mermaids, unicorns and fairies, designed to be '100 percent gentle, safe, and trustworthy'. It's a simple and very easy to use introduction to tarot cards.

Specifications

Name

Angel Tarot Cards

Creators

Doreen Virtue,
Radleigh Valentine

Publisher

Hay House 2012

Deck Type

Tarot Deck

Cards

78

Major Arcana

22

Minor Arcana

56

Suits

Air,Water,Fire,Earth

Card Language

English

Reviews
looks and handles more like an oracle deck. The cards
are large (3 ½ x 5 inches) and the card stock is
robust, but also glossy and slippery. All these factors
can make it a challenging deck to shuffle. It comes in
a sturdy and colorful box that should last for quite
a while. The backs feature an image of Archangel
Michael, and are non-reversible. Going by the packaging and
overall effect, the theme color of this deck is blue.
Silver edging adds a distinctive touch.

A 135-page book
fits in the box with the cards. It gives a brief intro
and how-to, two spread suggestions, a small B&W
picture of each card and a 2-3-para interpretation.
Overall the book is useful, or at least worth reading
through. It certainly gives enough to get a beginner on
track. Although no reversed meanings are specifically
given, one could draw both positive and negative
interpretations from what is there.

The Major Arcana roughly
follows the RWS tradition, with several title variations.
The Fool is titled “The Dreamer”; the Hierophant,
“Unity”; the Wheel of Fortune, simply “The Wheel”; the
Hanged Man, “Awakening”; Death is “Release”; Temperance
is “Balance”; the Devil is called “Ego”; the Tower
becomes “Life Experience” and Judgment is “Renewal.”

In
her little blue book, Doreen Virtue has softened the
severity of some cards. For example, she interprets the
fifteenth card, Ego, as a false sense of entrapment and
over-focus on material life. The sixteenth card, Life
Experience, is described as a wake-up call, “a moment both of
freedom and awakening.” Whether you like these changes of
title and interpretation is of course an individual
matter.

Each Major Arcana card depicts a corresponding
Archangel, with some double-up attributions (eg, Archangel
Michael shows on three cards: the Emperor, the Wheel and
the World. Gabriel represents both the Empress and
Awakening). For those who aren’t familiar with their roles, a
brief introduction to each Archangel follows the
interpretations given in the book.

The top of every Court card
gives a few words about the person it represents. I find
these keywords trite and stereotypical, hardly doing
justice to the possible richness within each person, so I
ignore them. Throughout the entire deck there is a also
2-3 line interpretation at the bottom of each card,
perhaps useful as a prompt for deeper analysis. Beginners
will appreciate this; experienced readers may find it
annoying. For me, some of these two-liners offered ideas I’d
never thought of before.

For Minor suit titles, the
deck’s creators have used the traditional elemental
attributions Fire, Water, Air and Earth, de-emphasizing the
symbolic tools. You’ll still see plenty of the latter in
the card images, though in the Air suit the swords are
mostly replaced by unicorn horns.

Yes, you read it
right, unicorns. Not only that but fairies feature in the
Earth suit; dragons in Fire; mermaids, whales and
dolphins in Water. All these in an angel tarot, you may
ask? Some may love these inclusions; others might feel
that in combining angelic and mythical representations,
Doreen Virtue has packed too much into one deck.

While
the card images aren’t exactly borderless, they are
framed by flat colors to distinguish each suit. The Major
Arcana is bordered by purple, Wands by russet, Cups by
aqua, Air by blue and Earth by green. This scheme adds
to the overall colorfulness—which gets me on to the
next point.

The drawcard (excuse the pun) of this
deck has to be the artwork. Steve A Roberts has done an
admirable job of creating lush and fantastical landscapes,
taking the viewer to what looks like an exotic tropical
planet. I find some face renderings a little disappointing
(eg. the angel in the Lovers; the mer-people in the Ten
of Water), and that the oceans in the Water suit all
seem to be the same shade of blue, but this is
quibbling. While the artist has reused backdrops here and
there (eg. Eight and Nine of Earth), for me this didn’t
detract.

At first I worried that the visual lushness
would overwhelm this deck’s readability, but so far I
find it remarkably accurate. Sometimes I miss the more
explicit symbolic details given in (say) the RWS deck, but
nevertheless this one works for me.